This last year I was working on a game with my daughter before she went to college. It wasn’t a great year. There was a lot of distractions and hurdles that got in the way in my personal life. My obsession with reading #GamerGate related stuff ate up a lot of time too.

I’ve been taking a break from game development for the last couple months and playing video games. During my break I was allowing myself to decompress while the burning heap of a failure my last project became burned itself out. Now I am starting to work on my own project since my daughter started college and won’t be available. I’m excited to get started on it.

So far all I have is some ideas. I am going to attempt to keep the scope of the project small. It will be first person and made with Unreal Engine 4. My first goal was to make this post. Check! Even anonymous I’m pretty shy. My second goal for this project is to include at least one rigged and animated human character. I also want to complete this project and release it for free to the public polished and complete and accept feedback.

Hopefully I will update every week or so. Next time I will give more details. Right now all I have is some ideas and know that it will be a horror adventure game. I’m working on a Preproduction Blueprint and will post parts of it as I work on it. Then when that is complete I will start posting updates as I work on the actual game.

I can’t believe how long it’s been. Had a major unexpected thing happen in my life. Doesn’t excuse all the time but a lot of it. The plan is to pick up where I left off but scale my ideas down more. I hope to post something within a week or two. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

After some meandering about for a week and getting frustrated trying to decide on a direction for the story I decided to begin working on the environment. I created some basic modular pieces I plan on detailing more later on. Normally I would start by building the level using BSP but this time I decided to jump right into making models. The modular walls were being a pain with lighting so I ended up using BSP for the walls possibly permanently.

I used some default UE4 materials just for testing things out and haven’t done proper UV unwrapping yet on the meshes.

My test building exterior and modular pieces:

My modular pieces including the walls that had lighting issues:

Interior of my test building:

In the last day or so I think I finally zeroed in on where I want to go with the story and even how the gameplay might work. The basic idea right now is to create a large Colonial Revival house built sometime around 1876-1890. The original owner was believed to have been extremely rich. He fought in the Civil War for the South and was rumoured to have been in possession of a fortune in Confederate gold. Despite this, when he died he left very little money to his family. The family turned the house into a Bed and Breakfast because they needed the money.

Over the years many visitors died in the house and it gained a reputation for being haunted. Some treasure hunters believe the gold exists and that the original owner hid it somewhere. The protagonist suspects the owner may have left some clues in the Bed Breakfast to help locate the gold. It might even be inside the building. Recently the Bed and Breakfast was shut down for renovations. The protagonist plans to break into the building at night and search for clues to the treasure.

The player will explore the building and search for documents, hidden symbols, hidden messages, etc. They will also have to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles to access all parts of the building. The ghosts won’t simply be there to scare the player. They will provide obstacles, objectives and rewards.

I plan to do some research to make sure I get the historical facts correct. I also need to flesh out the ghostly characters the player will encounter and the gameplay.

I decided to keep my updates simple and post screenshots and gameplay videos whenever I can. Posting all my research and design documents would be too difficult for me to keep up with. Hopefully I’ll update again in a week or two.